A. Acknowledge differences with the report, but acknowledge that the presidential administration want honesty, independence, and thoroughness in its scientific advisors.

B. Ignore the report.

C. Trash the report, thus making the administration sound disingenuous about relying on the panel in the first place, and thus undermining public confidence in the fairness of the criminal justice system.

Before I got around to spending more than one hour reading this 140-page Report, I learned that President Obama’s Attorney General and FBI director already had trashed the Report.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch proclaimed in relevant part, apparently on the Report’s September 20 issuance date: “We remain confident that, when used properly, forensic science evidence helps juries identify the guilty and clear the innocent, and the department believes that the current legal standards regarding the admissibility of forensic evidence are based on sound science and sound legal reasoning… While we appreciate their contribution to the field of scientific inquiry, the department will not be adopting the recommendations related to the admissibility of forensic science evidence.” (Emphasis added.)

The FBI’s September 20 reply is less definitive than Attorney General Lynch’s response, and includes asserting: “Finally, the report ignores important differences between forensic science disciplines, conflating fundamental differences between class-level and identification-level evidence, leading to troubling generalized conclusions about all forensic science disciplines.”

Furthermore, seeming to parrot back some of Attorney General Lynch’s and the FBI’s reply (with an apparent haste-caused typo of September 2 versus the Report’s September 20 release date), the National District Attorneys Association issued a news release trashing the Report. The essence of the NDAA’s press release is that: “Adopting any of [the Report’s] recommendations would have a devastating effect on the ability of law enforcement, prosecutors and the defense bar, to fully investigate their cases, exclude innocent suspects, implicate the guilty, and achieve true justice at trial.”

I will still read the remainder of the Report, which will not simply go away because trashed by the very presidential administration that spurred on the Report, and that posted the Report on the White House’s website. However, with the Report in the news, I wanted at least not to delay in giving the above and below summary and comments on the report.

On the civil liberties (versus civil rights/equal opportunity) and criminal defense front, I have not been thrilled too much by President Obama (nor by any recent president), aside from such items as his underlining and addressing (to a point) the unfairness of excessively harsh sentencing, acknowledging how harmless is marijuana, being more enlightened on immigration than would Republican presidents, and nominating judges less harmful than would a president Trump or any other recent Republican president or presidential nominee.

However, of all presidents, I would have expected President Obama to have not okayed Attorney General Lynch and the FBI to trash the Report without at least underlining that the administration was not seeking a rubber stamp from PCAST. One might ask whether Attorney General Lynch’s and the FBI’s trashing came about independently of President Obama’s go-ahead (at least a go-ahead to respond any way they wanted), but that would sound absurd in the trashing of a report that President Obama himself spurred.

President Obama is well advised to step in and publicly reject the Justice Department’s and FBI’s wholesale trashing of the Report. At the very least, the legacy that President Obama apparently wishes to leave as a level-headed president on criminal justice calls for such a public rejection.

The Report warns of “confirmation bias” in forensic testing: “the inclination to confirm a suspicion based on other grounds.” The Justice Department’s and FBI’s trashing of PCAST’s Report is the very definition of confirmation bias, through trashing a Report whose findings the Justice Department and FBI did not want to hear.